RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama spent his final six years in office—and especially the last two—governing largely by executive fiat. He issued executive orders, and his administrative state issued tens of thousands of pages of new regulations that took on the force of law. He called it rule by pen and phone.

This infuriated millions of Americans and contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, and one irony is that this also means that Mr. Obama’s policy legacy is less durable. Mr. Trump will now have the chance to reverse these orders and regulations often without new legislation. Here are three ways he and Republicans can proceed:

New executive orders. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute counts more than 250 executive orders signed by President Obama, plus more than 230 “executive memoranda.” These did everything from creating a new investment vehicle called MyRA, which seeks to encourage new savers to invest in government debt, to directing federal agencies to demand new data to investigate pay disparity by race and sex at government contractors. The Trump transition should review every one so the boss can rescind them if he wishes.

A related category are orders issued by federal agencies without a formal federal rule-making. Mr. Obama’s regulators made an unprecedented practice of issuing “guidance” that allowed agencies to duck rule-making while still forcing targets to comply—or risk enforcement action.

A classic of this genre is the Education Department’s rewrite of Title IX telling universities how they must handle accusations of sexual assault. Other examples run from auto lending to drug discovery to housing rentals. The President’s order legalizing four million illegal immigrants that is currently tied up in court can also be dropped at the stroke of a pen.

Mr. Trump can instruct his new cabinet secretaries to immediately void all such Obama guidance or else put it through the lawful rule-making process. He can also order federal agencies to immediately cease work on regulations in process or due to be sent for publication in the Federal Register.

Congressional Review Act. This legacy of the Gingrich era allows Congress to kill the many last-minute regulations now making their way through Mr. Obama’s agencies. For items enacted in the last 60 working days of this Congress—which probably will mean since late May this year—lawmakers can consider them in January without threat of a Senate filibuster.

That’s how Republicans dismissed Bill Clinton’s last-minute ergonomics rule in 2001. GOP lawmakers put four of these resolutions on the President’s desk during this Congress, but he vetoed them.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/16/bill-de-blasio-calls-for-more-disruption-to-protest-donald-trump.html

Liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is calling for more “disruption” to protest the election of Donald Trump.

“We have to recognize that all over this country, the more disruption that’s caused peacefully … the more it will change the trajectory of things,” he said in a radio interview on Monday, adding that Trump did not have a mandate to implement his agenda because he failed to win the popular vote.

De Blasio also pledged that New York City would not comply if Trump sought to restore “stop-and-frisk,” a controversial policy that was deemed unconstitutional by a U.S. district court judge in 2013. “They can threaten to take away money, but they cannot tell us how to police our streets,” he said.

The Democratic mayor, who aspires to be a standard bearer for the left, criticized members of his own party for failing to address the concerns of working-class voters, who “have every right to feel cheated.”

The Islamic Society of North America was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in funding Hamas. It was linked to two Hamas funding fronts, the Holy Land Foundation and KindHearts. ISNA’s checks were made payable to the “Palestinian Mujahadeen” or “Holy Warriors” which was a name used by Hamas.

ISNA’s co-founder Sami Al-Arian was the local head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Mousa Abu Marzook, a top Hamas official listed by the Treasury Department as a Specially Designated Terrorist, received tens of thousands of dollars from ISNA.

This should have come as no surprise as both ISNA and Hamas are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But the American Jewish Committee has decided to team up with the financiers of the murder of Jews to oppose Trump. The left wing Jewish group and an Islamist organization that wrote out checks to Islamic terrorists enabling them to kill Jews have formed the “Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council”.

Statements from both ISNA and the AJC made it clear that this was a reaction to Trump’s win.

“We are uniting to help the administration navigate in the proper constitutional manner, to uphold freedom of religion and constitutional rights for all American citizens,” Eftakhar Alam of ISNA said.

“It is a reaction to some of the bigotry and hate speech that came out of the campaign,” Robert Silverman, the AJC’s director of Muslim-Jewish relations said. “We’re concerned about the public discourse in the whole country. We’re also concerned about messages that originated within the two communities. The Trump phenomenon is only going to make it come together more quickly.”

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) is the leading contender to head up the Democratic National Committee. In announcing his candidacy for the position, Ellison said, “When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion, or sexual orientation.”

Ellison has the support of the progressive wing of the party, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the so-called establishment types such as Senator Chuck Schumer.

What would a Democratic Party led by Rep. Ellison really look like? One need look no further than Rep. Ellison’s own statements, associations and actions. Under Ellison’s leadership, the Democratic Party will continue to evolve into a pro-Islamist party that helps advance the stealth jihad agenda, and a party that moves away from its traditional support of our closest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has a past history of working actively on behalf of the anti-Semitic firebrand Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In 1995, writing as Keith X Ellison, he published a column for Insight News, which praised Farrakhan as “a role model for black youth” and denied that Farrakhan was an anti-Semite. In 1997, Ellison defended a statement by Joanne Jackson of the Minnesota Initiative Against Racism, who was reported to have said that “Jews are among the most racist white people I know.”

When Ellison first ran for Congress, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), provided his support at a fund raiser in Minneapolis for Ellison. Ellison in turn has spoken at CAIR fundraising events. He also defended CAIR against credible charges that CAIR was trying to infiltrate staff offices tied to committees on the judiciary, homeland security and intelligence. At CAIR banquets in late 2008, Ellison urged CAIR supporters to seek jobs in the then incoming Obama administration.

Some of Ellison’s donors have “a history of Muslim Brotherhood connections,” according to Campus Watch. The Minneapolis branch of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Muslim American Society reportedly paid for Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca for the Hajj in 2008.

Trump-haters of both parties are using the president elect’s conciliatory meeting with Obama to suggest he dial back on his campaign promises and govern like the typical politicians he ran against. The old mantras of “healing the divisions” and “bipartisanship” are being chanted once again, with the usual mythic anecdotes about Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill yukking it up over drinks. These are the same sirens whose seductive songs of comity and cooperation and coming together to “solve the country’s problems” have lured many a Republican onto the rocks of policy disasters like Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the confirmation of Obama minion Loretta Lynch as Attorney General.

There are already a few signs that Trump is being influenced by such chatter. He told the Wall Street Journal that he might keep Obamacare’s disastrous mandate that insurance companies insure those with preexisting conditions. On 60 Minutes he walked back his promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary’s pay-for-play foundation. This might just be conciliatory rhetoric designed to tamp down the anger of Democrats. Let’s hope that’s all it is, for such accommodation is seldom if ever reciprocated by Democrats.

On the contrary, Democrats have repeatedly proven that bipartisanship to them means that Republicans roll over for whatever Democrats want. If not, Republicans are tarred as obstructionists, racists, or whatever other epithet du jour. That’s because progressives are cultists hungry for more power so they can impose their ideological vision by any means necessary. Like Goldfinger, they don’t want Republicans to talk, they want them to die. Assured of their political righteousness, they have one standard for themselves, the elect, and another for their enemies, the damned. The two terms of Barack Obama are a textbook case of progressive campaign duplicity followed by a refusal to respect competing ideas and negotiate in good faith. Exhibit number one is Obamacare, passed without a single Republican vote, and rammed through Congress with legislative legerdemain and big barrels of pork.

Then there’s Obama’s bypassing of Congress all together once it was taken over by Republicans. He made it clear he felt no compunction about trashing the Constitution’s separation of powers and limited executive whose primary purpose is “to see that laws are faithfully executed.” Like progressive godfather Woodrow Wilson, he wanted the power to make “good” laws, not just to veto bad ones. “If Congress won’t act, I will” and “I have a pen and a phone,” he threatened. As for “healing divisions” and “bipartisanship,” he dismissed all that by saying, “Elections have consequences,” brushing aside bipartisanship with an arrogant “I won,” and advising his partisans to “punish our enemies.” His philosophy of governing has been the “Chicago way”: “If they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun.” Nor was he punished for behavior Republicans keep warning is political suicide. He beat light-red super-nice-guy Mitt Romney by five million votes.